EPILOGUE

Lehigh County Judge William E. Ford couldnt get Norton vs. Norton off his mind.

This is the case that Ive been coming back to and thinking about, Ford said from the bench on March 26, just before he announced his ruling in the custody case.

Ford had listened to three days of testimony from parents Bill and Cynthia Norton, and from Kit himself. Hed also heard separately from Kits psychologists and Bill and Cynthias friends.

With whom should Kit reside? What would be the appropriate result for a case that had dragged on for nine years?

Bill had been searching for his son since 1991. The FBI and police had found Cynthia and Kit in Indiana on Dec. 19, 2000, and she immediately sought a custody hearing in Lehigh County Court.

This very good woman has done a very bad thing, Ford said. The unspeakable has happened in this particular case. Its hard to imagine a parent losing contact with a child for a period of nine-plus years.

A great injustice has been done to the father. A great injustice has been done to young [Kit], in that he has been denied the contact that a child should have with both parents, in this case, the father.

Today, Kit, now 15, is a New Yorker, living in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn with his father. Cynthia, free on bail, is allowed supervised visitation and daily telephone contact.

Kit and his father share a fourth-floor, 5,000-square-foot loft that Bill, doing the carpentry work himself, has converted to living space.

The neighborhood is a mix of hip, trendy restaurants, large ex-factory buildings taken over by artists, and town homes occupied by longtime Williamsburg residents.

Kits bedroom window faces south, giving him a generous view of the Williamsburg Bridge and the lower end of the Manhattan skyline.

A 10th-grader, he attends a public school for gifted students, and negotiates New Yorks subway maze to attend class. He keeps in touch with friends from Goshen, Ind., and Evanston, Ill. Hes made new friends in New York.

Bills days are filled with converting the loft space into a suitable home for a teenager. Besides building a bedroom for Kit  who still uses the name Carl  Bill has added walls and closets to give his son more privacy and room.

Bill, a landlord who supplements his income by selling his original pieces of art and doing construction work, hasnt returned to making new art. His earlier paintings were cubic and chaotic images that suggested somber moods.

His parents help cover his legal bills.

Cynthia is awaiting trial on charges of concealment of the whereabouts of a child and interfering with child custody. She has been churning out paintings. Reba Place Church has held at least one fund-raiser to help her with her legal costs.

She works non-stop in her studio, which is nothing more than the front room of her apartment on Linden Street in Bethlehem. The studio space is cluttered with paintings in various phases of completion, a bucket of cloudy water, brushes, a power drill and hand tools.

Living alone, she visits friends or rents movies from the public library when she feels lonely.

Her visits with her son have involved going to church, lunch and strolling around New York. The visits included Derek Danton, Kits godfather, whom Bill and Cynthia had agreed to as a third-party monitor. Kit, through his lawyer, has petitioned the court for unsupervised and expanded visits with his mother.

A psychologist who spoke with Kit said he has no memory of abuse, a court record shows.

Bill and Cynthia see each other at court hearings and visitations, but their relationship remains strained.

Cynthia hasnt given up her effort to win custody of her son. Her lawyers have appealed Fords custody ruling to Commonwealth Court. The criminal charges against her were sent to Lehigh County Court after a preliminary hearing in August. No trial date has been set.